


Infinities

by Prevalent_Masters



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Allurance if you squint, Character Study, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Gen, I love all my children, Team as Family, everyone's just a little bit sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-30
Updated: 2019-04-30
Packaged: 2020-01-11 08:36:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18426933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prevalent_Masters/pseuds/Prevalent_Masters
Summary: Sometimes the possibilities of his other selves flit through his mind like a sped-up film reel, images blurring together, different pasts and futures spiraling out towards infinity, terrifying and beautiful and heartbreaking all at once. What if, he thinks. What if he’d never grown out of memorizing ballet moves and dancing down the street in the rain? One or two different choices. One or two different forks in the road that never presented themselves.--The paladins contemplate the people they might have been had they not been swept up in an ancient intergalactic space war.





	Infinities

**Author's Note:**

> I was on a run and not enjoying myself and thinking about how in some alternate universe I might be a super fit ultra runner and then I wrote this.
> 
> Takes place sometime in early season 8, probably.
> 
> Idk how video game development works.

When Lance was little, he danced. He had entire sections of ballets memorized, performing them clumsily in front of his amused parents and annoyed siblings with as much drama as he could muster, stealing his sisters’ tights and tutus. At age eight his parents finally broke down and enrolled him at the tiny dance school in Varadero--ballet, jazz, modern. In middle school, in the midst of applying for the Garrison, he auditioned for dance company and earned a spot. He danced with them for less than a year before he shipped himself off to the Garrison.

He curses as he ducks around a spray of laser fire, rolling Red over, a siren screaming in his ear. Shiro growls something over the comms and lasers burst from the Atlas, alleviating some of the pressure.

Sometimes it hits him, up here in space, how different things might be if he’d made one tiny different choice. If his family had been able to afford the tuition for the ballet school he’d always quietly dreamed of attending. If he’d never heard of Takashi Shirogane and decided that space exploration was the most badass career ever. He might be some famous big shot in New York or London by now. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Even after he was at the Garrison, his fate ultimately sealed, he’d joined the arts club, a haphazard conglomerate of every kid who enjoyed drawing, painting, pottery, writing, acting, dancing, singing...you name it. Attendance was always dismal, just him and a few other weird kids who were stretched between the love of the stars and dreams of flying and some other creative pursuit. Half their brains reciting poetry, the other half occupied by Newton’s Third Law. Forced to choose between two wildly different loves, maybe rationalizing their choice by thinking of financial stability, future jobs, family expectations. Or maybe that’s just Lance.

Ever since they met Slav, he’s been thinking a lot about alternate realities. In another universe, is there a Lance dancing for the New York City Ballet or performing on Broadway? Is there a Lance writing poetry, a Lance painting abstract portraits from natural pigments at an artist’s colony in New Mexico, a Lance who stayed on the farm growing mangoes and tomatoes next to his father, a Lance who decided to be an accountant for some reason, or who went to law school? A Lance who danced at a strip club thanks to that one pole dancing class he’d taken in secret, sneaking into town from the Garrison the semester before they’d shot into space? Or does every possible reality end with him here, fighting a war a million and a half light years from home? Sometimes the possibilities of his other selves flit through his mind like a sped-up film reel, images blurring together, different pasts and futures spiraling out towards infinity, terrifying and beautiful and heartbreaking all at once. What if, he thinks. What if he’d never grown out of memorizing ballet moves and dancing down the street in the rain? One or two different choices. One or two different forks in the road that never presented themselves.

He takes a hit on his side and yelps as Red lurches sideways, controls sparking.

“You okay?” Hunk’s voice crackles through the comms.

He takes a deep breath. He’s not on earth. He’s not a ballet dancer. He’s probably never going to curl his body around a pole again, or feel the smooth surface of a stage beneath his bare feet. He’s Lance, he’s a paladin of Voltron, he’s saving the universe. The choices have been made, the chips have fallen. No point mourning a Lance that doesn’t exist and never will.

“I’m fine,” he replies, “but this tactic isn’t working, Keith, we need to go in with the big guns!”

Keith’s voice crackles over the comms, firm with resolve. “Okay,” he says, “Let’s form Voltron!”

.

Pidge hadn’t had much cause to think about what she wanted to be when she grew up until her dad and brother disappeared. After all, she was still in middle school, she had time to figure all that out. Part of her wanted to follow her brother to the Garrison, part of her always wanted to explore the stars, or help someone else do it; but she wasn’t really thinking about it much. Her true love was computers and coding. She built her first computer at age nine, and from there she spent most of her time not at school fiddling with software and little pieces and parts, and creating her own video games. Pretty damn good video games, given they were created on cobbled-together computers using homemade software, hunched over past midnight, blocking the bottom of her door with a towel so her parents couldn’t tell her light was still on.

She’d developed her first fully operational game by age eleven. She’d sold the download for cheap over online forums and before she knew it, a lot of people were playing. She worked on it more, made modifications, made it better. She started working on another one. It was better than the first. More people played that one, and by age 14, she was making a pretty steady income. Nothing major, but enough that she didn’t have to ask her parents for money anymore.

She worked on her games and programming. She did her homework. She read articles about gaming and game developing and read comments about how women were shitty game developers and didn’t belong in the industry and hit back with angry comments of her own, hidden behind her neutral username. She wondered if she even felt like a woman at all, because some days she felt so uncomfortable and stretched in her own skin, and this whole puberty thing definitely wasn't helping. She ate dinner with her family and her dad and brother prepared to go to a moon of Pluto and she didn’t care much because she was working on her third game, and this one was going to be way better than the others. She was thinking about cutting her hair and she’d gotten an email from a hiring executive at Enix a few days ago who said the company was interested in working with her.

And then Dad and Matt were gone and she thought a bit more about space and thought; maybe it would be interesting to develop programs for something more than games. Something that would go farther. Something that would go into the stars, something that would explore other worlds, something that might, someday, be the interface that an alien would look at as it’s first interaction with Earth technology.

She laughs at that, now, dodging a blast from a Galra fighter and a volley of covering fire from the Atlas. Too bad the Alteans were leagues ahead of anything Earth managed to produce ten thousand years ago. Too bad the Galra have sick robots.

She’s proud of herself for understanding all that technology enough to work with it, though.

Truth be told, she hadn’t cared about anything real, anything that _mattered,_ until Dad and Matt went missing. Until the Garrison told them nothing, nothing, nothing, and then that they were dead. Just dead. Gone.

Bullshit.

If the Garrison wasn’t such a shithole of an institution, if her dad and Matt never went into space, if she’d never heard of fucking Kerberos or all the other dumb moons the Garrison felt the need to explore, she could have been the billionaire CEO of Enix by age 20. Hell, she could have been the billionaire CEO of Enix, hacked the White House, stolen the nuclear codes, and bartered for world peace. Probably by 19, if she’s giving herself the credit she deserves.

Instead, she’s somersaulting around in Green, trying to avoid getting shot and get a clear view at the ships on Allura’s tail, listening to Lance scream and something that sounds suspiciously like Hunk trying not to puke.

She could have been a _billionaire_ by now.

In some wonderful fantasy universe she probably is.

She should ask Slav about it sometime. See which socks she should be wearing every other day to lead to that outcome.

At least she’s in a reality where she gets to hack shit all the time. Honestly, she loved game development, but hacking is her true calling. In some other universe, she’s a badass hacker. Known across the internet, hired for the most difficult jobs, uncovering corruption and injustice, bringing down governments. There’s nothing like the thrill of cracking an encryption, of getting into a network and shutting it down. In that famous hacker universe, she’s also a billionaire.

Honestly, she can’t conceive of a universe where she _isn’t_ a billionaire, except the shitty one she’s currently stuck in.

It’s not all bad, though. She grins as she finally gets a clear shot and sends vines exploding through several ships tailing Allura, freeing her up to dart around and freeze another couple of fighters hounding Lance.

 _Good girl,_ she thinks to Green and receives a spark of triumph in return, an aura of pulsing, green life. She was never much into plants before she got shot into space. Never much into going outside, really. Too much going on inside the screens of her computers to bother much with anything else. Now, she thinks she might take up some gardening if they ever make it back to Earth. There’s probably another universe out there where she’s, like, a farmer or something. Or a florist. Or a botanist. Infinite possibilities.

“You okay?” Hunk asks, concern bleeding from his voice. She wonders if she would still have these friends, this family, around her if things were different. If she was a billionaire CEO of a game company, would Hunk still be there, a warm, solid presence? Would Lance be around to make her laugh? Would Keith somehow still manage to be her grumpy boss? Would she have Allura as a friend to laugh with at night, when neither of them could sleep, Coran to answer all her questions? Would Shiro be there somehow, reassuring and steady, solid and kind? Would Matt still be her brother? Would Dad be her dad?

“I’m fine,” Lance coughs over the comms. “But this tactic isn’t working, Keith, we need to go in with the big guns!”

Despite the battle, the uncertainty, the fact that she is decidedly not a billionaire and probably won’t be anytime soon when she absolutely deserves to be, she’s suddenly stupidly grateful for what she has. For the people around her. For this stupid, messed up, cobbled together family.

She should probably tell them all she loves them more often. Or show them. She will. After this battle. After they’ve won. If they exist in all those universes where she’s a billionaire, she hopes she’s given them all several million dollars. She hopes she’d be a philanthropist.

“Okay,” Keith says, because he's recently taken to listening to Lance for some reason. “Let’s form Voltron!”

.

Allura didn’t want to be a queen. It was what she was raised for, educated in politics and policy and royal bloodlines and how to curtsy and bow and sit politely at a dinner table and compliment a lord from the planet Daube or a high priestess from Zola or a Galran warrior. And she’d sat and learned and bowed and curtsied and complemented and engaged in peace talks and charmed her way into alliances and hated it, hated every second.

She doesn’t remember when it started, the love of plants, of quiet things; but she knows it was when she was young, very young. A distinct memory stands out: running towards her father through a field of juniberries, all blooming in a riot, swept up in his arms and twirled in the air. Alfor setting her down carefully and brushing away a fine yellow dust that had settled over her dress.

“What’s that?” she’d asked, dragging her own finger through the golden dust and holding it up for inspection.

“That’s pollen,” Alfor replied absently, ruffling her hair.

She blew on her fingertip and watched the dust cloud into the air, glistening slightly against the backdrop of the setting sun. “What does it do?”

“It creates more flowers,” Alfor said, turning to walk back towards the castle.

“How?” She asked, tripping after him as he continued walking through the meadow.

“If you go to the greenhouses, they can tell you,” he’d said, clearly trying to end her questions. She’d followed his advice, and beelined directly for the royal gardens when they’d returned to the castle to pester the gardeners, who had given her an explanation she barely understood but was still fascinated by. And then she’d kept visiting, first to bombard them with questions about different plants and where they were from and what they did and how they worked and if they had flowers and if you could eat them. Then, after awhile, she visited to stick her fingers into the soil to feel the moisture and water the pots if they were too dry and then to cup tiny seedlings in her hands and tuck them into freshly turned beds or drop minuscule seeds into tiny pots to line up underneath the greenhouse windows or take cuttings from some rare herb or another in an effort to propagate it. She was never sure if the gardeners put up with her because she was any good at it or if it was just because she was the princess and they couldn’t tell her no. But she wasn’t bad at it. Sometimes it felt like the only thing she was good at.

She told her mother once that she didn't want to be a queen, she wanted to be a gardener. It was the angriest she'd ever seen her mother, pacing up and down, delivering a lecture on how Allura should feel privilaged, she should be honored, she cannot turn her back on her birthright. She banned Allura from visiting the gardens for three weeks, until Alfor talked her down, pointing out that Allura clearly needed some sort of outlet. 

As the tensions built between Altea and the Galra, as the paladins’ arguments echoed through the hallways of the castle, as her father walked around with a crease between his eyebrows and her mother cancelled diplomatic gatherings due to threats of terrorism, she retreated to the greenhouses. She seeded and transplanted and watched hopeful furls of green unfurl from dark soil and tried to ignore what was happening because she couldn’t trust her father’s reassurances, not when his eyes were so tired and empty, not when she knew what had happened to Uncle Zarkon and Aunt Honerva.

A burst of laser fire erupts around the Red Lion and she spurs Blue towards Lance, shooting her own lasers. She has to keep them safe. They’re all so young, they all had lives before they ended up here with her, lives she learns more about day after day. She feels guilty sometimes. Constantly. She wants them to be able to go home, a place that still exists for them.

They are her age. She is still so young, too, ten thousand years later. Sometimes she forgets.

When it all fell apart, when Alfor told her what she had to do if there was hope of ever defeating the terrible thing that had been brought to life, she’d cried. She’d refused. She couldn’t imagine going on without her mother, her father, her world. What was the use?

Her father cupped her cheeks between his hands, rough with callouses from piloting his lion and fighting all his life. Hands she’d felt since birth, hands that meant love and comfort and safety and now couldn’t promise any of those things ever again.

She’d nodded. She’d told him to wait. Just a moment.

She ran to the greenhouses. Abandoned in the panic, one half collapsed, crushing the fragile plants. The gardens she’d loved already on fire. She bent over the tiny seedlings she planted the week before. The tender reach of juniberry shoots, stretching towards the suns.

Red takes a hit to the side and she hears Lance’s yelp of surprise, of pain. Lance. She doesn’t want him to get hurt. She wants to protect him. Gritting her teeth, she spurs Blue towards him, blocking another volley of lasers with a blast of ice.

She’d grabbed seed packets from drawers, stuffed them in the pockets of her skirts, cupped a few juniberry shoots in her hands, shoved them in her pockets, too. If the pods could keep her alive in a suspended sleep, could they save the tiny plants, too? Could they bring them alive into the uncertain future?

It seems an empty hope, foolish. But she cannot imagine waking up to a future without her parents, her planet, her people, _and_ her flowers.

She would save something. Even if it’s nothing but desiccated seeds.

Hunk’s concern bleeds through the comms. She twists Blue to protect Lance’s back, registers Pidge’s vines exploding through a few ships stuck on her tail, covering fire flying from the Atlas where it hovers behind them.

The pod was cold. She remembers, excruciatingly, the feeling of freezing in place, watching her father with tears falling down his cheeks, hand clutched around a handful of soil, a bunch of tangled roots, the tiny spheres of seeds.

“This tactic isn’t working, Keith!” Lance shouts through the comms. “We need to go in with the big guns!” She agrees. She knows what’s coming. Blue purrs in the back of her mind. _Calm_ , the lion urges _, you will have your fields of flowers. You will have your unfurling of life. We will finish this someday soon._

She sighs deeply, clenches her hands around the controls, pictures an endless field of pink flowers. Pictures Lance, in the middle of it, hand extended out to meet her. Pictures all of them, safe, alive, happy. Her family. She grits her teeth.

“Okay,” Keith says, determined, brave. The Black Lion made a good choice with him. Even if he doesn’t believe it, still. “Let’s form Voltron!”

.

He should have gone to culinary school.

This is his thought process whenever they’re in a fight they’re clearly losing. Also during some that they’re winning. Mostly, this is his thought process all the time:

  1. He loved cooking as a kid. Sure, he’d also loved fixing cars and fiddling with machines and inventing stuff, but he’d _loved_ cooking. And watching cooking shows. And eating. And he wasn’t half bad at it.
  2. He won a cooking competition in middle school. He got a set of chef’s knives and $100 out of it. He could have capitalized off that success! Instead, he’d applied for the Garrison. Why’d he done that?
  3. Oh right, because Lance had, and Lance was his best friend, and it seemed a good idea at the time. He liked fixing shit. He might as well fix shit in the name of science. Also, Lance wore him down over weeks and weeks of nagging. He really should punch Lance some time for that. Peer pressure isn’t cool.
  4. Except he can’t punch Lance because he loves Lance, Lance is his best friend, and anyway, it’s not nice to punch someone when they’re super stressed out because they’re in the middle of a space war.
  5. But also, Lance isn’t puking every other day from the stress. That’s all Hunk.
  6. What was this about again? Oh, right. He should have gone to culinary school. Le Cordon Bleu. The Culinary Institute of America. He could have gone to France and cooked, or worked on a farm in Hawaii in exchange for cooking classes to learn more about the cuisine he grew up eating.
  7. In other fucking words: what the hell was he thinking, becoming an engineer, ending up in space, dealing with _food goo_?



He barely avoids laser fire against his flank and careens out of the way to block a volley headed towards Pidge. To his right, Lance gets slammed by some fire and yelps. He winces.

“You okay?” he asks. His stomach is queasy. He’s trying not to puke. In another world, he owns a restaurant, cooks every night, spends his days coming up with new menu items, wandering through farmer’s markets full of familiar ingredients. Tomatoes and peppers, bunches of kale, sweet apples and mangoes and bananas, strawberries and blueberries. In another world, he grows taro in a backyard plot the way his mom always did. In another world, he works in a restaurant in Tuscany, learning every last thing he can about pasta. In another world, he brings people together with his food and he laughs with them and builds up a community around himself instead of breaking everything apart with lasers and gunfire and sheer brute strength.

He’s not even a fucking mechanic out here. He just shoots stuff and throws up and tries to save people he can’t save and fix situations he can’t fix and he’s just so scared all the time and he wants it to stop, stop, _please just stop_.

He wants to stop the sick feeling of fear every time one of his teammates--his _family_ \--is in danger and not responding through the comms. He wants to stop that helpless feeling that crawls up his throat when faced with alien fruits and vegetables and unfamiliar cuts of meat when all he wants is pork laulau made by his uncle. He wants to stop hearing Lance crying quietly at night, Shiro hyperventilating in his room when he thinks no one can hear him. Pidge talking quietly to herself, monologues to her mom and dad a million miles away. Keith’s grunts as he fights bots in the training room and refuses to talk to anyone. Allura’s sighs as she looks at the weak seedlings she’s managed to coax out of the seeds she brought with her to their time. Coran’s silence as he stares out at the stars. He wants it to stop. He wants to be a goddamn sous chef at Chez Panisse and shell beans in the morning sunlight while they figure out what will be on the menu that day. He wants to cook for Vrepit Sal’s. He should have just stayed at that space mall food court. Damn the universe.

Maybe there’s a world out there where he _is_ Sal. Where the 10,000 year old evil empire is Earth and he's cooking for aliens his people enslaved.

Terrifying thought.

“I’m fine,” Lance groans over the comms, not sounding very fine. Hunk sighs with relief anyway. “This tactic isn’t working, Keith!” He adds, “We need to go in with the big guns!”

Hunk would yell “agreed!” very loudly because honestly, why didn’t they form Voltron ten minutes ago, but he’s a little busy shielding Pidge so she can continue to grow vines through a bunch of ships tailing Allura. Now _that’s_ a cool power her lion has. How come his lion never got a cool power like that?

 _Not that you’re not cool,_ he thinks as Yellow rumbles unhappily in the back of his mind. _You’re the best. You can get big and tear shit apart and pull stuff together and I wouldn’t want to pilot anything else. But we’ve got more to discover together, don’t we?_

Yellow rumbles happily, love rushing through his mind and he suddenly thinks, _I'm so tired, but I wouldn’t want to be anywhere but here._

_With my friends._

_Protecting them._

_Defending the Universe._

_Even if I do really want some pork laulau right now._

“Okay,” Keith says, in response to Lance, and Hunk grins and whips Yellow around, ready for it. “Let’s form Voltron!”

.

Right after his father died, in the first of a long line of foster homes, Keith dreamed nonstop of the desert. Red spires and fine sand, the scent of juniper and the colors the sky would streak at dusk, the dry, baking heat, the riot of wildflowers blooming after a rare rainstorm, streaking the valley floors like spilled watercolors. The landscape he saw out his window now--suburban streets and oil wells, browning lawns and wide parking lots, swimming pools and stars dulled by light pollution--seemed so colorless in comparison, dull and numbing and unreal.

He figured out what he wanted to be when he grew up during a class trip to Big Bend National Park. A park ranger stood in front of their class and showed them fox pelts and bobcat tracks and snake skins and talked about how important each animal and plant they saw around them was to the desert ecosystem; and Keith couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe that there were people who got paid to live out here and look at plants and animals all day. He sat still through the whole lecture, staring wide-eyed at the ranger, quiet and well-behaved for once, to the shock of his teacher.

At the end, while the rest of his class ran wild through the visitor center, he’d sidled up to the ranger. “Excuse me,” he asked, “how do I get this job?"

The ranger laughed. “Stay curious,” she said, “and keep visiting places like this.” Then she gave him a little workbook and told him if he completed three activities out of it, he’d get a Junior Ranger badge. Keith completed every activity in the book except for the one where he had to go on a hike, because his teacher wouldn’t let him, and got the badge. It was the best day he’d had since his dad died.

He thinks about that badge as he pushes the Black Lion faster, faster, trying to overtake a Galra fighter right on Allura’s tail. It’s tucked away in some box back at the cabin in the desert. Absurdly, he wishes he had it with him, up here in space, wishes he’d grabbed it before they shot off in Blue. Not that they’d known at the time that they wouldn’t be back on Earth for years. He wonders if he’ll ever hold that battered pin in his hand again. Probably not.

Even now, he dreams of Big Bend. Of standing against the barrier at an overlook, wind tossing his hair into his face, staring out at endless desert, blending into piercing blue sky in the distance. The Rio Grande a thin, twisting ribbon far below, Mexico beyond, the crumbling remains of a few sections of the old border wall breaking up the landscape, buried in sand and falling off into canyons. The only view that can compete with that memory is the first time he stood on the edge of the Grand Canyon.

Sometimes, when he’s especially stressed, when he feels like he’s about to shake apart with it all, when he’s about to crack into a million pieces, he withdraws into those memories and imagines himself down in one of those canyons, sheltered from the desert sun by tall sandstone walls, letting the cool water of those rivers lick at his toes. As he grew older, he started fantasizing about working as a wilderness ranger, just him and a mule deep in the backcountry, all alone, taking care of the desert. That dream never really left him, just faded in the face of reality after he got behind a flight simulator and stole Shiro’s car. The Garrison was a way out, an opportunity, a friendly face, more immediate than the abstract concept of losing himself in the desert for a career someday, so he followed that path and the desert receded behind him until it disappeared completely. Even when he went back to that lonely cabin, he was too obsessed with figuring out those strange radio waves and the weird pull back to that particular cliff and what happened to Shiro to really fall back into his love for the land around him.

This battle is going badly. He’s not sure what to do. He is not a good leader. He is not a good leader. He is not a good leader. He was born to be alone, to leave a solitary set of footprints through drifting sand, to disappear between the shadows of cliffs and the quick erasure of flash floods during the rainy season. He understands the wilderness better than he understands his own teammates. Existing alone within a wide expanse of empty land is so much easier than coexisting with other people.

He hears Lance yelp through the comms and the Red Lion careens across his field of vision, a hit to the side. He curses quietly underneath Hunk’s concerned questions crackling through the comms, hears Shiro's muffled _fuck_ in harmony with his own.

“This tactic isn’t working, Keith!” Lance says, voice insistent in his ears. “We need to go in with the big guns!”

Lance is right. He thinks of canyons, dark and cool at midday. He thinks of desert flowers blooming at night. He thinks of the line of the Milky Way, curling its way across a dark night sky. He wonders if he’ll ever feel the cool crumble of sandstone against his fingers again.

“Okay,” he says, schooling his voice into something certain and strong, “Let’s form Voltron!”

.

Shiro always knew he was going to end up among the stars. He spent most of his childhood watching old re-runs of NOVA, even though they were pathetically out of date, and had most of the dialogue of _Apollo 13_ memorized by age eight. The fact that nothing in that movie went well for the astronauts didn’t stop him from wanting to be up there with them.

The Garrison was an obvious choice. Fighting to the top of his class there was an obvious necessity. Becoming one of the youngest pilots to ever lead a mission was the obvious result. Nevermind what it cost him. Nevermind that those last two years at the Garrison passed in a haze of fear and confusion over the disease that was ravaging his muscles, nevermind Adam’s tender voice, his soft hands at night. Takashi Shirogane was going to die young, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to die before he got to space. The Kerberos mission should have been that--that final success before he started really going downhill. Before he died. They should have returned successful, with new scientific data and maybe a little hero worship, and after that he should have been able to die satisfied with what his life had been.

Things, Shiro has learned over the course of the last four years of his life, rarely happen the way you expect them to.

He watches the lions reeling through space in front of the Atlas, fighting some rogue Galra forces, and orders Veronica to lay down covering fire as Lance gets slammed with lasers on his left flank, somersaulting through the sky, yelps echoing through their comms. He curses, quiet and low, hopefully too muffled to be heard over the comms. They’re _children_ , for God’s sake. They don’t need to hear him swearing, stressed. His hands are clenching and unclenching on the controls and he tries to relax, tries to force the still unfamiliar weight of the new arm to _calm down,_ to not crush everything in sight.

That’s his family out there. Pidge, unfailing and determined and unyielding. Allura, who has lost everything, who fights with all she has and somehow manages to drive herself with compassion rather than hate. Hunk, the bravest of them all, really, gentle and kind and absolutely unwilling to let any of his team get hurt. Keith, his little brother, precious and a more powerful leader than he’ll ever know. Lance, the glue that keeps them all together. Even the MFE pilots, who he’s known for mere weeks--he has to protect them, has to insure they all make it through. He loves them all, his family. He’s not quite sure how he ended up here from quoting _Apollo 13_ but he’s damn well not going to waste it. He spent months as a ghost inside the Black Lion. He’s not a ghost anymore.

“This tactic isn’t working, Keith!” Lance yells, crackling on his comms and Shiro thinks, _good, yes Lance, help him out._ "We need to go in with the big guns!"

He thinks, _you need to form Voltron_ , and for a moment he remembers the feeling of sitting in the Black Lion, mind melding with hers, the feeling of joining with his teammates to create something bigger than all of them.

His hands are trembling.

Curtis passes behind him, a hand ghosting gently over his shoulder blades as he moves back to his own station from consulting with Coran at the cannon controls. Curtis, who found him in the hallway having a panic attack a few days ago and instead of recoiling, or laughing, or calling for someone else to help, held him gently and told him to breathe and said, _it’s okay, Captain, I get them too_.

And he’d replied, after his breath returned to his body, _call me Shiro, Curtis._

While he was a prisoner of the Galra for that endless year, fighting every day, fear and pain and hopelessness warring in his heart every moment, he’d dreamed of returning to earth. He’d thought, _someday I’ll be back and I can have a home, somewhere quiet and away from people. I can hug my parents and be with Keith and I’ll find Adam, I’ll apologize._

_Someday, everything will be okay._

That’s what got him through that year, those dreams, even though under the fragile hopes he’d known, deep down, that he would die here, in this prison, bleed out on the arena floor, end up alone and forgotten, his fate never explained to any of the people he so desperately fought to return to every day.

And then he’d escaped, and his first coherent sight in what felt like months was Keith’s eyes, his warm arm around his shoulders, a couple of vaguely familiar cadets with him. And then he was back up in the stars before he even had time to think but this time it was to fight. It was for revenge. It was to _win_.

When he was young, watching documentaries on string theory, alternate universes, the Mars expeditions, he never imagined himself piloting a giant mech thousands of light years from Earth, watching his family fight back an evil empire. He’d never imagined the furious determination alight behind his breastbone, the anger, the love, the surety that they would finish this. That together, they would _win_.

He hasn’t been through hell to lose. That’s for damn sure.

When he was young, he couldn’t imagine that he would end up here. There were infinite possibilities, drifting through the night sky, the wheeling stars he watched through his bedroom window. He never could have guessed.

But he knew, no matter what, he would live out his future among the stars.

“Okay,” Keith says, sure and strong through the comms. Veronica shoots him a wicked grin. Coran shouts, “Yes, paladins!” Curtis winks at him. _Winks_. His hands have stopped shaking.

“Let’s form Voltron!”


End file.
